Thumbnails on YouTube Can Be a Dirty Business, Craig Rubens Says

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I caught up with NewTeeVee's Craig Rubens in New York recently at a party for his influential blog.  In our interview, Craig unearths one of the dark secrets of online video marketing.

Here's the scam: Since a thumbnail, the image from a video that appears on index and search pages can't be selected and inserted, some clever scammers have figured out how to insert an image, often unrelated to the clip,  into the point in the stream where it will be selected automatically by YouTube. 

Thumbnails are critical for the discovery of videos.  We reported a few days ago on a relatively new development at YouTube where uploaders get a choice of three automatically selected thumbnails. 

We'll look forward to Craig's reports on this on NewTeeVee.

Speaking of NewTeeVee, it is doing great.  According to the latest Alexa numbers on daily reach, NewTeeVee is kicking the living borscht out of poor Beet.TV and maintaining a lead over PodTech, that's if you believe the Alexa numbers, of course.

-- Andy Plesser